Remember when Altavista was the search engine? Or Yahoo? They stuffed their search pages with useless, distracting crap, and using them became unpleasant. And then, bam, along came Google, with a simple, clear search page and uncluttered search results. However, now that Google has become this massive behemoth, tracking our every move, and tailoring our search results, leading to only being fed those pages you agree with - isn't it time for something new? Something simple? It might be, and you've undoubtedly heard of them: DuckDuckGo. I'm switching. Update: Just got an email from Gabriel Weinberg, the guy behind DuckDuckGo. The OSNews !bang (!osnews) is now live!

I think the big problem is that relevance is a relative term. What you might consider a relevant result for "barefoot unicorn dildo porn" might be considered irrelevant by someone else. The past ten years of Google's near-ubiquity has certainly coloured our expectations of what is relevant. I would say that the mere stringent exclusion of sites like eHow from DuckDuckGo's results is reason enough to consider DDG more relevant than Google.

I do believe differently. Ehow results are maybe a 50/50 shot with me. Half the time they are exactly what I need and none of the other results are even close. The other half they aren't but having a single additional result isn't that bad.

The exact opposite of what you said is one of the main reasons I haven't been able to completely ditch Google for DuckDuckGo yet. The results I got, while decent, weren't quite what I was looking for and unfortunately weren't as good as Google's.

The default setting of opening a result in a new tab is also extremely annoying; sure, it can be changed... but clear your complete history (or just cookies), use a different browser, or get on a different computer and you're stuck with it again until you change it back. IMO, virtually no page should force a new tab open; it's 2011, with our three-plus button mice that seem to have been common for probably over a decade now, all it takes is a middle click to achieve this when it is actually wanted.

I never knew about the !bang thing, I tried it and it's really cool.

As for the whole privacy thing... I use Ixquick or DuckDuckGo on occasion, especially when looking up things more legally questionable, because I don't trust Google at all. They've got the government in their f***ing pockets, and they admitted that they would have no problem giving complete logs to them. Once DuckDuckGo gets good enough to replace Google... I might just switch fully.

I have about as much trust in my own government as I do those companies that lobby and force their own definition of laws onto us... practically none.